

We assess the role of foreign labour in Polish agriculture in the short run, and reflect on the sustainability of the supply of foreign labour in the long run. The results clearly indicated a multi-generational and positive impact of LCP on the development and functioning of rural areas. Additionally, within the merged village the lowest level of land abandonment was observed, which was indicated by analysis of the areas covered by secondary forest succession and afforestation processes within formerly agriculturally areas. This is the most evident regarding the average plot size, road accessibility and land fragmentation indicators, which are calculated based on the area of the land parcel. The results demonstrated the long-lasting effects of farmland merging, which are still evident even 40 years after the project has been completed. The research was focused on the Jabłonka commune located in the southern Poland. The additional goal was to determine the scale and intensity of changes in LF that took place after farmland merging, and to estimate the influence of LC to farmland abandonment by analysing the intensity of secondary forest succession.

The aim was also to confirm that the parameters of LF within merged area are still much more favourable than those in neighbouring areas that have never been subjected to LC. The main aim of this research was to verify the hypothesis of persistence of favourable basic parameters of land fragmentation (LF) and other factors affecting the efficiency of agricultural production that are still observed even several decades after LC. The assessment of economic effectiveness of LCP can be an essential argument in budgeting proceedings and in discussion of the importance of land relocation in the sustainable development of rural areas. The high cost of implementing land consolidation projects (LCPs) justifies investigation of the question about the duration of economic effects of farmland merging. This finding can assist future research in this or related fields by providing a worldwide overview of rural depopulation research over time. However, international collaborations are growing, new trends appearing, and other related fields are expressing greater interest in rural depopulation, which could indicate the preceding stage to an eventual consolidation of the theme. The main conclusion is that rural depopulation is not yet a solid field of research and the most important themes identified are related to specific geographical areas. Results show two major areas of co-citation networks a poor network of collaboration between countries with some highlighted interaction an author collaboration network with close groups of knowledge and two main themes resulting from a co-word analysis. In order to develop the analysis, bibliometrix R-Tool was used and the metadata of two databases (WoS and Scopus) was retrieved and merged. A bibliometric analysis was developed to analyse a final sample of 1150 articles published between 19. The aim of this study is to identify the worldwide trends in rural depopulation scientific production over time in the main levels of analysis: sources, authors and documents. However, a global picture of the research carried out on this topic does not exist.

The scientific production on rural depopulation has grown in recent years.
